Do Not Track (DNT) will be in the news yet again this week. In the wake of Microsoft's decision to ship Internet Explorer 10 with Do Not Track on (DNT-1) by default and following face-to-face negotiations last week in Bellevue, Washington, the Senate Commerce Committee will take up Do Not Track at a hearing on Thursday at 10 am EST.

In recent years, online tracking companies have begun to monitor our clicks, searches and reading habits as we move around the Internet. If you are concerned about pervasive online web tracking by behavioral advertisers, then you may want to enable Do Not Track on your web browser. Do Not Track is unique in that it combines both technology (a signal transmitted from a user) as well as a policy framework for how companies that receive the signal should respond. As more and more websites respect the Do Not Track signal from your browser, it becomes a more effective tool for protecting your privacy.

The fifth W3C meeting on Do Not Track was held in Washington DC last week. While progress has been made on many aspects of the standard for Do Not Track, several deep disagreements remain between privacy advocates and representatives of the online tracking industry.

Most seriously, ad industry representatives maintain that they need to be allowed to continue setting third-party tracking cookies on browsers that send the Do Not Track HTTP header. This coalition of companies say they "only" want to track opted-out users for security purposes, market research, testing and improving their various advertising and tracking products, auditing, copyright enforcement and other "legal compliance" purposes, and "frequency capping" in order to manage online advertising campaigns — but not any other purposes.

Do Not Track continues its surge of momentum in the past few months. As we document in The State of Do Not Track, a number of stakeholders are recognizing the importance of user control over whether or not an online company can track users and how much information, if any, the company can collect. Noticeably absent from the conversation are hard numbers on users' attitudes towards online behavioral advertising, or "targeted advertising."

When Stanford researcher Jonathan Mayer uncovered a Google workaround to circumvent the default privacy settings on Safari, EFF called on Google to change their tune on privacy by respecting the Do Not Track flag and building it into the Chrome browser. We specifically praised the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) multi-stakeholder process, which for a year has been convening consumer advocates, Internet companies, and technologists to craft how companies that receive the Do Not Track signal should respond.